Stripped Down To the . . . Clear Cedar

I had previously stripped down the door, hoping that we could stain it and it just wasn't that nice.  I started stripping some trim and the siding and garage door and found somewhat of a surprise on the front porch -- what looks to be very good condition, clear, all heart cedar:

We had been trying to pick colors for the siding and had narrowed to four (the colors on each side of the door are the same and the background color is what is existing - the brown next to the window is the bare-ish cedar):

I liked one okay (the one on the line with the mailbox / second from the top) and Laura didn't fight enough to go get more colors to test, so we were about to go with it. We though the top one too brown, the second from bottom to grey and the bottom not as good as the one we were leaning towards.

As luck (?) would have it, my old sander broke while Margot and I were finishing her garden sign. So, I needed to get a new one.  The replacement was way better than the original (the plaid flannel shirt, however, did not come standard).

 So, I busted out the heat gun (update on that front in a coming post) and started scraping a lot of paint to the floor:

Digging through at least four layers: (taupe, peach, white, and beige) not counting the test layers I slathered on:
 

And, sanding down after scraping off 60 years of paint revealed the following:

I'm not a wood expert, but it looks like cedar and looks like pretty good quality stuff.  Of the dozen or so boards I've cleaned off so far, I've found one knot that is about the size of a dime.  The rest of it is pretty clear.

So, the current plan is to give this a light stain or maybe just a clear coat.  I cannot, however, figure out what we are going to do with the panels that flank the door.  They are crap plywood.

A window?  I cannot do that on both sides as the one on the right leads to the front hall closet.  Anyone?

Growing Some Grass

While my patch is small and there is still a long we to go -- weeds, intermittent balds patches, crab grass, etc. -- we have come a long way.

To start this season, this is what we were dealing with the backyard.  It was an eyesore:

We had tried to slit-seed last fall with some success.  It had been an absolute disaster last summer as we didn't have the sprinkler system turned on and I rarely was able to water.  So we had this.

I was in touch with Marc Wise at Greenwise in Evanston and he hooked me up with some supplies - seed, starter fertilizer, soil builder stuff and a word or two of encouragement.

I got things roughed up, top soil put down, seed and starter fertilizer in place and peat moss to cover it all up (not proud of using a non-renewable product like peat moss, but its what everyone does and it seemed to work). It rained twice, heavily, in late May (or early June?) and it ended up washing a ton of the work away and into the garden/flower beds, but as they say, "third time's a charm" and we got things started again (amazing how just rain and thunder greened things up tremendously in a couple of week!

A couple of weeks later -- with some bi-daily watering, we got to this:

Still patchy and thin, but getting there.  I overseeded again in mid-june.  Fertilized, and dropped some more peat moss.

For reference, there is last summer's "before" (prior to slit seeding):

After cutting the lawn last Friday, I snapped somewhat of an "after" shot here:

Still patchy here and there.  Way more weeds and crab grass, etc.  But we are getting there.

Its All Out of the Storage Locker

When Laura and I finally made the decision to sell our condo, we put all of our HGTV-watching knowledge to use and we "decluttered" like crazy.  Half of our walk-in closet was emptied.  Tons of secondary stuff from the kitchen was moved off site.  The on-site storage lockers were even emptied to make them look VERY roomy.

The end result was that we needed somewhere to put it all.  That ended up being the Self Storage 1 on Elston and Armitage.

Well, when we first moved to Glencoe, we downsized and couldn't even fit all of our decluttered stuff into that apartment and had to rent a second one - Extra Storage Space in Highland Park on Old Deerfield Road.

By the time we were ready to move into 991 Edgebrook, we had moved a bunch of stuff out of both lockers, but not a ton. Our movers cleared out the Highland Park locker on our "moving day." But we just didn't have enough good space to put the rest of it (and didn't feel like paying the movers to schlep it down into the basement, only to have it moved elsewhere shortly).

So, Laura and I (and me in solo trips) went to the city periodically and emptied it out.

About two weeks ago, I finally cleared the last of it out of there. Pictured below is the toy chest I built for Margot, and old mirror and one of our Metro shelving units.

And, there is the emptied, bigger-than-a-bedroom storage locker.  Its not Rust Cohle's locker, but then again . . .

With the exception of some things lingering at my mom and dad's house, all of our "stuff" is now back in our possession.

500 Pounds of Limestone Presents Some Logistical Problems.

So, the fireplace that used to be pretty "fancy"(see below) got a complete makeover.

There's the "front" view -- it was double sided to start.  I always forget the name of the stone that surrounded it.  Nice yellowish color.  Brass framing of the fire box.  All nicely clad with wood paneling painted that putrid shade of beige.

This was the other side of it, which we closed up -- somewhat to my wife's chagrin.

The idea was to make it as SIMPLE as possible.  This was one of our inspiration photos:

Super simple, super clean. This was the nearly-complete result, sans hearth.

As the post says, there were logistical issues - some we anticipated, some, not so much.  One we anticipated was the nightmare that it would be to cantilever a 500 pound piece of limestone like in the inspiration photo,  not to mention having to raise up the fire box. Easy solution?  The limestone was going on the floor.

The wall, nearly finished in Venetian plaster, the hardwood laid in the floor with a precisely measured opening on the floor for the limestone.

One issue was just the weight of it.  Adam (pictured left, above), had thought - a though encouraged by the stone guy - that just these two guys were going to be able to bring it from his truck to the house.  Adam, unlike me (after the fact) hadn't done the calculation of how much 3 inches x 24 inches by about 96 inches of limestone as going to weigh.  The answer -- a bit over 500 pounds.  That would be 250 per guy.  Probably not impossible, but why?

So, we were delayed a couple of days while Adam rounded up some muscle -- the painter, his son, these two (and, as it turned out, me, to a certain degree). With proper man power in place, it made it journey from van to living room:

Fortunately, I'd religiously been shoveling our front walk, so it wasn't an icy mess.

Sizing (and weighing) up the challenge.

Our painter (left front), Adam (right front) and Adam's son (left rear)(the fourth being out of the picture).  125 pounds per guy was a lot better than 250# per guy.

OK, so its in the house.  Now what?  It was an accomplishment to get it from Point A to Point B unscathed, but it was quickly becoming apparent that we hadn't anticipated the difficulties in getting it from Point B to Point C -- namely, in place in front of the fire box.

It was resting on two pieces of trim.  The cutouts from the baseboard were in place (in hindsight, it would have been easier to have the baseboard go in AFTER the slab went in. And, the cut out on the Venetian Plastered wall were done.  Finally, the white oak had been laid and trimmed to accept the hearth.

But how to get it there without: (a) scratching up the floors, damaging the baseboard, damaging the Venetian Plaster wall?  It was cut to fit perfectly "in place" but not to get there.  Whoops.  We were going to need to get a little bit lucky.

Margot did not have any ideas . . .

. . . except to add her hand prints to the freezing-cold slab.

Adam decided to put down some mortar while we all thought about the problem.

The winning idea was to shove the slats underneath, slide the slab across it (as no one could be on the other side to lift it) shoving, a la a leg press.

Smearing the mortar was a lot more thoughtful than it looked. Adam essentially needed to space it so that nothing spooged out and also so that the slab on top of it would settle flat, without any teeter-totter effect.

There is one photo missing here -- because it was never taken, because I was called upon to help.  Essentially, that photo would show Adam and one of his guys sitting on the floor facing the fireplace, heels up against the slab, with me and his son bracing ourselves to the floor as much as possible, so that we could provide a spot of resistance to avoid just sliding backwards.  And, the painter trying to provide support on the other side. As a photo, it could have looked cool. As a video, it would have been ugly, because it WAS ugly.  The floor was slippery. We couldn't get any traction. The slab was heavy, so the leg pushing was pushing us more than it was pushing the slab. And when push came to shove (forgive the pun), that last few centimeters were where things crashed a bit. But thankfully, just a bit. As the slab slid into place, there was a bit of a chip to the Venetian Plaster (repairable). There was a bit of a gash in the baseboard (also repairable). Worst, there was a bit of a chip in the corner or the limestone (not really repairable, but not very noticeable -- it was the corner going into the wall).

Once it was in place, Adam trimmed the edges with some "spare" pieces of the kitchen countertop.

Electrical Finished in the Kitchen

The electrician was also by recently to finish up some matters around the house -- kitchen, living room outlets, data runs, etc.

Among the visual elements we completed were the wiring and hanging of the pendants that float over the island. And the mounting and hook up of the flat screen.

Three Eglo Rondo globes. The electrician also swapped out all the LR/DR bulbs for ones that work with the dimmer transformers, so we now have 2700k "soft white" LEDs that are on a smooth scrolling dim!

Excuse the mess, but this is the LR shot back at the kitchen with the pendants and the flat screeen mounted for bar-eating and viewing!

Kitchen Nearing Completion!

The last of the countertops went in a couple weeks ago (I've been bad about updating).  This was the "floating" counter across the front kitchen window.  My GC built a Nelson-Bench-esque platform on which the counter would float. The other portion was sitting partially on the cabinet that went in instead of the "wine fridge" that was part of the plans.

Once again, Sylvester, of Luxury Granite, Inc., worked magic. Seems were again flawless:

"Before" - with cabinet uncapped and the "Nelson Bench" platform in place. The two outlets / boxes in the wall are for power and data for the flat screen!

Sylvester and his guy fitting the first piece.

Clamping the Caesarstone in place to even out the millimeters of variation.

Mini Update

Reno was at a standstill while the Polar Vortex was in town.  So, its been slow through the holidays up to now.  We are picking up again.  A bunch of insulation got blown into the attic -- nothing to see, but it makes me v. happy.

Visually, Adam was at the house today and put in the tile backsplash.  Here's his photo via SMS:

For contrast, here's a shot before the tile:

My stone guy was at the house recently too - the rest of the countertops finally went in.  I'll try to update those photos tomorrow.

Its supposed to warm up a bit, so hopefully, the laundry room window replacement will go in.  That leaves just the powder room as the last "big" thing.  Lots of small things, though.